Monday, December 24, 2012

Staunton, December 24 – The Kremlin
and the Russian Orthodox Church frequently say that 80 percent of the
population of the Russian Federation consists of Orthodox Christians, but a new
survey finds that only 41 percent of Russians in fact identify themselves as
members of the Church and only five percent say they are active members of
their local parishes.

Last week, the Sreda Research Center
and the Public Opinion Foundation presented the results of their Russian survey
of almost 57,000 Russian residents in some 79 of the federal subjects of the
country for the Atlas of Religions and Nationalities of Russia (ARENA) (www.blagovest-info.ru/index.php?ss=2&s=3&id=50465).

According
to Alina Bagrina, who coordinated this effort for Sreda, 41 percent of Russian
residents said they are followers of Orthodoxy and belong to the Russian
Orthodox Church, another 25 percent said they believe in God but do not profess
any particular religion, and 13 percent said they did not believe in God.

Some
6.5 percent said they were followers of Islam,4.1 percent of Christianity in
general, 1.5 percent “call themselves Orthodox but do not below to the Russian
Orthodox Church or to the Old Believers,” and 1.5 percent described themselves
as pagans.No other faith attracted as
much as half of one percent of the population.

As
Bagrina noted, “in recent years one hears that 70 to 80 percent of Russians
consider themselves Orthodox,” but such self-identification does say much about
religious practice. Indeed, only about five percent seek to practice Orthodoxy
and maintain ties with their local parish communities.

There
has long been an academic discussion of what identification of Orthodox means
if it doesn’t mean church attendance. (For a useful example, see www.religare.ru/2_98729.html.)
But the Moscow Patriarchate which routinely uses the 80 percent figure to advance
its agenda is clearly defensive about any suggestion that the real number of
Orthodox is lower.

Reacting to the Sreda-Public Opinion
Foundation figures, Vakhtang Kipshidze, an official of the Synod’s Information
Department, said that the Patriarchate uses the higher figure “not because we
do not read sociological studies but because these people [the 70 to 80 percent
rather than the 41 or five percent] carry in themselves the signs of Orthodox
identity; that is, they potentially belong to Orthodox culture” and listen to
Patriarch Kirill.

The links between religious identity
and nationality involve not just Orthodoxy and ethnic Russians. The new survey
found that only 6.5 percent of Russian residents are Muslims, a figure that
specialists dispute, apparently using the same logic as the Patriarchate, and
suggest that it is only a fraction of their real share in the population.

And the investigators reported that
Protestants are the most likely to follow religious rules, that Muslims are the
happiest, that Jews are the most unhappy, that Orthodox are most afraid of
immigration, and that Jews and atheists are the most likely to want to emigrate
themselves.